“I’ve always loved collecting perfume,” Influxious founder and French perfumery expert Funmi Monet tells ESSENCE. She’s established herself as a fragrance connoisseur in TikTok’s perfume community (coined #PerfumeTok) with a following of almost 600k fragrance fanatics. Her latest feat, however, just landed her new fragrance brand Influxious exclusively on the shelves of one of the world’s most successful retailers: Sephora.

Since 2022, she’s been growing her relationship with the retailer. She first joined Sephora Squad as a fragrance creator before returning as a mentor to help support the next generation of content creators. Then, she was accepted into the Sephora Accelerate program. “Every chapter prepared me for the next one,” she says. “I went from creator, to mentor, to founder, and now I’m launching my own fragrance house.”

With Monet’s community and Sephora backing her, “Influxious was born from a desire to expand what luxury fragrance could look and feel like,” she says. She’s launching with four fragrances: the spicy caramel Gold Standard, warm gourmand Well Loved, floral musk High Life, and juicy fruity Magic Hour.

While most retailers are full of fragrance trends, the Nigerian-American founder says her aromas—like Nigerian ginger, zobo, frankincense, and shea butter—are about rituals, memories, and home. Her first memory of fragrance was watching her mother get ready for church with perfume as the finishing touch. “I remember how she smelled when she hugged me,” she says. 

It’s a childhood memory that’s informed her approach to fragrance in adulthood. “I don’t begin with notes, I begin with emotions,” she says. “Fragrance is one of the most emotional things we experience because scent is directly connected to memory.” From transporting you to your grandmother’s kitchen or reminding you of a person you’ve loved, she uses her therapist background and fragrance reviews to help others find their personal scent. 

Her secret? “I never start by asking, ‘What notes do you like?’ I start by asking, ‘How do you want to feel?’” She also encourages people to build a fragrance wardrobe instead of finding one signature scent. “Scent should evolve with you,” she says. “I don’t have one favorite scent because I don’t believe we’re just one version of ourselves.”

Bottling up her fragrance mastery in Influxious, “t go online and see a brand that once existed only in my imagination available for sale is surreal,” she says. Her vision is for the brand to become a global luxury fragrance house redefining how people experience perfume. Until then, “we’ll continue expanding our fragrance portfolio with scents that deepen the sensory experience and invite people further into our world.”

Influxious will be available exclusively at influxious.co and Sephora July 27th.